Olivia’s Investigations — Turnabout (B)
Annabelle wasn’t a real person, but she had as many quirks and foibles as anyone else she’d met on the Internet. The man pulling her strings was Pat, a baker. He’d never thought of himself as a bad guy. He just enjoyed hanging around in online communities dedicated to the mind control fetish, hypnotising people who’d said they were interested in it and seeing how far he could push them. He’d invented Annabelle because he had an idea that people might be more willing to chat with a woman, but he’d never imagined how much of a life of her own she’d develop.
He knew her birthday and favourite sports teams. He knew her favourite teacher in high school, and now that vast swathes of the population were on the Facebook, people might actually be able to search somehow and find which schools had a Mr Jones teaching chemistry. Maybe they could work out where Annabelle had spent her childhood, so he had to be sure that his anecdotes couldn’t be easily shown to be false. Everything was available now, and that was both a blessing and a curse. Before he commented about something he remembered, he had to check the maps for her home town to make sure nobody who lived there could spot a discrepancy and realise she was just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Pat was really excited today, having found a new girl to play with. Pandora said her real name was Jules, but he pretty quickly found that she was happy to respond to Julie. Her profile said she was 19, and she seemed pretty naïve, but that was all he knew. There was no way to know if she was telling the truth, because he’d already found out that some of these people went to great lengths to convince everyone their online personas were real. Kind of like he did, he guessed. He chuckled a little at that, and reached out for another beer before continuing the conversation.
He asked Julie to think more about things that she found relaxing. She was quite eloquent, though with a couple of spelling mistakes. She talked about a forest, with a stream running through it, and a place to lie so that she could feel a gentle breeze brushing her clothes in time to the babble of the water. He kept his hand in by pasting lines from a script, telling her that the more she thought about it, the easier it would be for her to feel the same kind of relaxation. The descriptions she gave back were detailed and emotive, talking about her body relaxing, her legs feeling heavy but her hands still light enough to type without thinking. He could practically see her in his mind’s eye, eyes glazed and attention completely on the screen. If she wanted to claim she wasn’t in a trance now, she’d have to admit that the whole hypnosis thing was a fake, and they never wanted to do that.
And then she was onto another subject, how good it felt to be relaxed and obedient, so you could just lie back and relax. It felt like being in bed, she said, sinking into soft pillows while your body just did what it was told without you having to do anything. And when what you were told to do was relax, then body and mind were in harmony so deeply she couldn’t even think of resisting the blissful calm that came from her words.
Pat smiled at that, it was a beautiful image. Maybe that fantasy was what these people got out of their play. He knew that it would be wonderful to feel like that, if any of the stuff they were talking about could actually work. He could imagine it so well, imagine how it must feel for her to be so completely relaxed that she didn’t need to think at all. It was a lovely daydream to drift into, while he went through the slightly monotonous part of copying the script out to her. He knew how a trance was reputed to feel now, so well that he could have described it a dozen different ways without even referring to his manual. But they said the words were so important, you had to use the right words, so he would copy out the words from a script, and not have to worry about the details of the phrasing, or the rhythm, or anything other than how blissful he imagined it to be to relax and obey.
“I think it might be good for you to back off a bit,” Annabelle put a hand on Pat’s shoulder, and he paused his typing for a moment to look up at her. “You’re taking that hypnosis stuff so seriously, you’re completely lost in what you’re typing. I bet you’re just making her do the same things you always do, following a pattern like you’re not even thinking about it.”
“Hey babe,” he turned his chair away from the desk for a moment to look her in the eyes, “You know I enjoy this. Trying to think of new things for them to do, more exciting, seeing how far I can push the limits.” But as he said it, he realised he couldn’t even remember what he’d told Julie to do. It was more like force of habit than anything else, giving her a copy of the same instructions he gave every girl these days. Click, copy, click, paste. It was like walking once he’d done it enough times, you put one foot in front of the other, one line after the last, and didn’t even notice the details. He wasn’t sure if the girl was still in a trance, or if he was guiding her through the instructions he’d give to test her afterwards. Copying and pasting required so little thought that it was just a blur.
“You’re not enjoying it,” Annabelle shook her head, “That’s the problem. You make these girls do all kind of things, but all you see is text on a screen, so you don’t know if they’re really doing it or just pretending.”
“I know, that’s the thing. They’re pretending, but they get so invested in it, they might even send me pictures rather than admit they’re not really hypnotised. Hey, that’s an idea. I should ask that Julie girl to take a couple of pictures fucking herself with a banana. Then I’ll know she’s not just using pics of someone else, and she can get off on it too.”
“That’s a neat idea,” she smiled, “But have you asked her if she’s okay with that? You should make sure you’re not pushing people into things they’re not comfortable with.”
“Yeah, but if she doesn’t like it she could just stop playing. The whole point of this fantasy is not having the choice, right?”
“I think maybe you don’t really get it,” Annabelle looked stern now, “I tried being nice about this, but I think you need to be a bit more careful with the people you’re playing with. They’re putting a hell of a lot of trust in you, and I think maybe you won’t understand that until you feel what it’s like to be the subject for a change.”
“Maybe if it was real,” he shrugged, “But they know as well as I do that this is all some elaborate fantasy. What’s the point in worrying about someone’s feelings when the only thing I’m really commanding is some character they’ve made up online?”
“It is real,” she said, “That’s what you need to understand. Would you like me to hypnotise you, make you my slave, and then you can enjoy what you were going to put that poor girl through? Maybe you’ll think twice before you push someone’s limits like that again.”
“Oh, give me a—”
“Sleep,” she snapped her fingers right in front of his eyes, and suddenly there was nothing he could focus on but those beautiful, blue painted nails. He wondered for a moment how she knew that Annabelle’s nails were painted blue, he couldn’t remember actually telling someone that. But that thought itself made no sense, and he couldn’t understand why it had come to his mind. It would be easier to stop thinking altogether, and just keep his gaze on his mistress’s beautiful, sparkling nails as they made complex swirling motions in the air. He could watch easily enough, he knew he could get that right, and he didn’t need to pay any attention at all to the words she was whispering in his ear. He didn’t need to think about the things she was saying, he didn’t need to notice if she spelled any words wrong, because his subconscious mind could handle all the understanding. All he had to do right now was obey, and feel the things she was telling him.
Pat opened his eyes and looked up at the screen. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened for a moment. He must have got so bored by repeating the same suggestions that he’d nodded off.
“Sorry about that,” he quickly typed to this girl Pandora, “Had a bit of a distraction here. Can you remind me where we got up to?” He knew he could just as easily get a recap by looking at the previous lines he’d typed, they were right there on his screen, but at the moment he thought it would be easier to just ask.
“You were going to hypnotise me,” she responded. He could hear her voice in his ear, even though he knew deep down that they were only letters on the screen, and there was no way he could guess at her accent. He liked the voice he’d chosen for her though, it reminded him of his mistress Annabelle’s, so he decided he’d like to keep on imagining Jules’s words with that slightly exotic lilt. “But you’re tired, you couldn’t focus well enough, so I said why don’t I try to put you in a trance. Then you can see what it’s like, and that’ll help you understand better when you’re deciding what to do.”
He nodded, it was all coming back to him now. He’d hypnotised other girls on this chat room often enough, but he’d never realised just how intense the confusion could be on waking up. He made a mental note to remember that in future, and to make sure they were ready before going any further.
“So,” she continued once that had sunk in, “What did we agree I was going to do with you?”
“Just make me feel all spaced out,” he answered at once, that part of his memory wasn’t even slightly confused, “A little dazed, a little relaxed. I’ve never done this before, and I don’t know how far it can go, so I didn’t want to push it until I’m used to the feeling. You can understand that?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said to you,” Julie answered, and Pat nodded. It was easier to echo someone else’s words than to put effort into telling them what he or Annabelle liked, and what she’d asked for was pretty close to his own situation anyway. For all he knew how to hypnotise someone, he knew little about how it actually worked, and was pretty much in the dark about how it felt to be on the receiving end. Only a complete asshat would push someone into more than just exploring the feelings on their first trance. Before he could finish typing anything else, she asked another question: “So what were you going to do to me? Any more complex feelings, or just relaxation?”
“I was going to make you strip off and send me pictures, then if you were still responding to my suggestions I’d tell you to masturbate with a banana. I want to see how far we can push this thing before you freak out and block me.”
“Well, that seems like a good set of goals for a first session,” she shrugged. He knew somewhere inside that he was just seeing the words ‘Pandora shrugs’ on his computer screen, but he could visualise her so clearly that it was almost like talking to her. He knew now that she could control him as intimately, as completely, as Annabelle had been doing for years, and that realisation suddenly injected fear into his relaxed daze.
“Do that, then,” she continued, and he could already feel his hands moving to his belt like he was a puppet on strings before she clarified: “Start by undressing. And then we’ll see how far you can go.”